Brathwaite's "The Zea Mexican Diary"
My first Brathwaite read, The Zea Mexican Diary records the author's responses to the death of his wife from cancer. The diary includes "nine extracts from a diary Kamau Brathwaite started when he learned that his wife was terminally ill, nine extracts from letters he wrote to his sister Mary Morgan in an attempt to open lines of communication across the breach created by Doris's suffering and death, a statement written by the author on the night of her death and read at her Thanksgiving service by Edward Baugh, and a letter written by Ayama, which is interwoven with the author's meditations on the words and the Thanksgiving service that ocassioed them" (Foreword, by Sandra Pouchet Paquet). Doris Monica seemed to have given her life to supporting Brathwaite's scholarship and poetry. Before she died, she completed a bibliography of B's works, and B was editing that bibliography on the night of her death, and so was absent from the end. In the most moving s...